Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Product managers have to be on the road with the sales team and try to understand the market better. Any amount of market research is not sufficient to help understand what should the product shape up like. In case you have observed, We need two kinds of pitches to make - they need to be made on a specific scenario - some times to the same contact at the different times. Scenario 1:  You want the prospect to start listening to you. The prospect has not yet connected with you. This scenario is the most common when we do cold calling or when we meet people in conferences / fairs. The prospect has no idea who you are or what problem you are trying to solve. In this case, you need to have the following information What is his/her dominant problem? What figures do we have to state it more quantitatively? To put it in better perspective, The dominant problem of a typical retailer that we meet is as follows: I am not sure what kind of stock is left with me at the e...

Working in cross functional teams is the occupational hazard for product managers. A typical product manager needs to work with 3 kinds of teams: Engineering team - comprising of developers, testers and IT operations Sales / Marketing team Management team The product manager needs to have different set of information - or rather information represented and expressed in different ways for the three different teams. Engineering Team Focus: Focus on what needs to be done. Define clear milestones  Clearly communicate focus of the product and end user gain Help take decisions to architect the product Detail the product road-map from the engineering side Sales/Marketing Team Focus: Focus on what the product positioning needs to be Map the competitive landscape and find out how we are different from our competitors Clearly communicate the overall marketing / sales goals - with respect to details like channels, goal for the period Detail out the communication pla...